Twin Blades returns july 6th on a WP7 handset near you

Rejoice, Windows Phone 7-owning-gamers of the world, for Twin Blades is about to return to your well-gatekept platform in a matter of days!

Microsoft has decided to celebrate the US indie day by offering the game back to the world – this time including Germany- on July 6th ! That’s two days later than the much-needed fireworks admittedly, but hey you can’t be both the ban-hammer champion AND consider such petty things as calendar relevance.

Some ink has been spilled when the game has been banned on February 2nd, speculation went wild and we chose to stay quiet. We owe to all of you an explanation, which I would have given if there hadn’t been this guy on the internet who conveniently got it all right three months ago so I can save myself the trouble of actually explaining everything and instead copy/paste his stuff like journalists do.

Twin Blades was an Xbox LIVE branded game on WP7. Twin Blades has also been released on other platforms (Xbox LIVE Indie Games, iOS, PSP, etc). The game is the same on all platforms. The ESRB rated Twin Blades as M on PSP. This rating retroactively applies to all versions of that game, not just the PSP game. Since Microsoft complies with ESRB ratings, they must ensure that no one under 18 has access to M rated content. On Xbox LIVE you cannot download M rated content if your account does not indicate you are 18. Windows Phone 7 has no such restrictions in place at this time. Therefore, to comply with the ESRB, Microsoft removed the game. The game is still available on other platforms (iOS specifically) because others (Apple specifically) does not adhere to ESRB ratings.

Thank you gb330033, for the sake of precision I would add that the ESRB rating only covered the PSP version and didn’t actually cover any other platform, its just that uncle Mic’ likes to be extra careful when it comes to protecting our innocent children from cartoon zombies.

Anyway the new update (or Twin Blades 1.2) changes the color of the blood from gore-red to spinach-green. It also changes the way users’ music is handled in the background when playing the game, which is more of a guideline-compliance thing than a bug-fix.
Everything else, gameplay, achievements, storyline etc. remain untouched. You don’t HAVE to update if you’d rather have your blood red, but if you do there will be no turning back.

Apologies to those who bought Twin Blades, had to reset their phone for whatever reason and couldn’t download the game anymore, there was nothing we could do.

It took a while for the update to be released, and in the words of Rovio CEO Peter Vesterbacka: “let’s just say, Microsoft has a lot of lawyers” – which leads me to believe he single-handedly sucked up all of their legal resources and left us none to file our one page amendment.